Is Michael Ignatieff an anti-Semite?

No, I don't think he is. And, contrary to apoplectic Liberals, that's not the accusation made in these Conservative mail-outs. Here's a detail of one of those mail-outs:

You can see that it is a fact-based comparison chart between the public positions taken by the Conservatives and Liberals. For example, it is simply a fact that Michael Ignatieff called Israel -- and not the terrorist group Hezbollah -- the war criminal during the 2006 conflict.

That bizarre slander against the Jewish state cost Ignatieff the support of Susan Kadis, his Toronto campaign co-chair, who quit his campaign over the remarks. Kadis was later thrown out by voters in Thornhill, in favour of Peter Kent; other Liberal MPs in ridings with significant Jewish populations saw their vote share plummet, too. Take Joe Volpe, in Toronto's Eglinton-Lawrence riding, who saw his 11,000 vote lead in 2006 evaporate to a 2,000 vote lead in 2008 -- a stunningly weak showing for a riding in the thick of the 416 area code.

That's why the Liberals are spitting bullets over these Tory pamphlets: they know that Volpe can't afford to lose another 9,000 votes, but a few more "war crimes" comments from Ignatieff, and they will.

Ignatieff's war crime comments weren't a slip of the tongue; they were the reiteration of Ignatieff's long-held views about Israel -- views that may have been fashionable in Ignatieff's academic circles in the U.K., but that are shockingly out of touch with Canadian political norms.

Take this insane rant that Ignatieff wrote for London's Guardian in 2002. Funny enough, I came across that article courtesy of Warren Kinsella, who wrote on this website that he "objected to" Ignatieff's comparison of Israel to "the fascism of apartheid". Apparently Kinsella no longer objects to that grotesque comparison, for he's scrubbed his criticism from his blog, and went to work for Ignatieff as a senior aide. But I agree with the old Kinsella: Ignatieff's comparison of apartheid South Africa to democratic, pluralistic Israel, where Arabs sit in the Knesset and even on the Supreme Court, is odious. I wouldn't call it anti-Semitic; but it's just an arms-length away. I guess Kinsella is comfortable with that. Then again, Kinsella is the political operative who gave help and advice to the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress in their censorship campaign against Maclean's. That's bad enough, but the CIC is a notorious apologist for terrorism. Its president at the time, Mohamed Elmasry, had said that it was legitimate for terrorist to kill any Israeli adult. Elmasry was a delegate to the last Liberal leadership convention, so I guess a lot of people share Kinsella's comfort level with Jew-hatred in his party, though I doubt even Ignatieff would work for Elmasry's bigoted group like Kinsella did.

You really should read Ignatieff's whole essay. It wasn't some off-the-cuff remark made by Ignatieff in a scrum, where he might have mis-heard a question or mis-spoken the answer. This was an essay that he spent hours writing and revising; it can fairly be taken to be the state of the art of his thinking, the wise professor's considered opinion. Here are some nuggets from it:

Ignatiff compares Israel to crusaders and Apartheid:

 

When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.

 

Ignatieff says Israel is what destroyed the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern:

 

Now that its troops have pillaged the offices of the Palestinian Authority, confiscated hard-drives, emptied safes, destroyed records, Israel has destroyed the one entity that might be able to control the territory it cannot.

 

Ignatieff says Israel is brutally repressive, like France was in Algeria:

 

Repressing a population bent on national independence destroyed the French Fourth Republic in Algeria, and it will kill Israel.

 

The right of return for Palestinians is an "excellent idea":

 

Absorbing the entire Palestinian population into Israel as equal citizens would be an excellent idea

 

Israel is "angry and embittered" just like terrorists are:

 

Both sides, moreover, are not just angry and embittered...

 

Israel is extremist, and part of a death cult, like the terrorists:

 

Eighteen months of extremism on both sides... a mutually reinforcing death cult.

 

Like the terrorists, Israel isn't capable or willing to make peace:

 

...neither side is capable of making peace, or even sitting in the same room to discuss it.

 

A solution must be "imposed" on Israel:

 

The only way to seize the opportunity is to impose a two-state solution now...

 

U.S. troops must force Israel to comply, and must protect Palestinians from Israel:

 

the US must then commit its own troops, and those of willing allies, not to police a ceasefire, but to enforce the solution that provides security for both populations.

 

What a nut:

 

Imposing a peace of this amplitude on both parties, and committing the troops to back it up, would be the most dramatic exercise of presidential leadership since the Cuban missile crisis. Nothing less dramatic than this will prevent the Middle East from descending into an inferno.

Is Ignatieff an anti-Semite? No, I don't think so. But his opinions of Israel are word-for-word the kind of thing that anti-Semites like the Saudis or the PLO would say. I think that it was Ignatieff just being a fashionable pundit in British academia, where anti-Semitism is rampant. "Just visiting" isn't just a Tory campaign slogan; it's a real problem for someone who has lived his whole adult life in other countries with other political norms, trying to impose himself on Canada. Sorry, we just don't buy into the moral equivalence that Ignatieff contracted overseas. 

You can see why other anti-Israel activists within the Liberal caucus have felt empowered to spew their own venom. Here's Mark Holland's crazy anti-Israel mail-out to his own riding. It's from back in 2006, but Ignatieff continues to give Holland a prominent role in his caucus.

Holland's screaming, front-page headline is:

Harper's pro-Israel cheerleading is dangerous foreign policy shift

and it goes downhill from there, implying that Israel deliberately targeted civilians in its 2006 war against Hezbollah terrorists. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn't Ignatieff influencing Ignatieff, maybe it was the other way around -- maybe Ignatieff saw Holland's buffoonery, and thought a well-placed "war crimes" comment was what Canadians wanted to hear.

I've got to run now, but let me upload one of my favourite comparisons between the Conservatives and the Liberals. If I have time, I'll post some more proof of a systemic anti-Israel bias within the Liberal Party -- a bias so comprehensive that even Ariela Cotler, the wife of Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, publicly quit the party over it.

The Liberal spluttering you hear is the anger of someone being caught, not the anger of someone being falsely accused.